He socked it to the IFS, who party pooped by saying that the CSR hits the poorest hardest.

Now anybody with a numb skull will jump to it that if the poorest have been the greatest beneficiaries of Labour’s largesse, then if you roll that back they will be hit the hardest. D’oh. Obviously this is a bit tough for Nasty Nick’s self image of bluebirds tweeting and everything being great, but it’s what happened. And the IFS called it out

just what part of this do you not understand? There’s crow to get eaten here, and it’s your turn, along with all that university fees and graduate tax jazz too. Suck it up, bud, and salute your heart of darkness. It’s a harsh introduction to the realities of what can actually be done compared with what it would be nice to do.

It’s disturbing to be on the same page as the Dirty Digger, but I think Rupert Murdoch summed up Labour’s failure to get traction on the problem pretty well.

It wasn’t a matter of furnishing the underprivileged with privilege, but of providing them with opportunity.

When we had loads of pretend money sloshing around, spreading privilege around a bit was easy, but it didn’t address many of the issues. The Digger hasn’t addressed the other side of the coin, which has been the concentration of power and abuse of it at the CEO level either, where there are excessive short-term rewards for long-term failure. But the insufficiency doesn’t detract from his sharp observation of the problems of Labour’s approach to the poor.

No doubt the IFS analysis is a better reflection of the facts, but look at how modest all the cuts are. It suggest that the aggregate depressive effect will be no more than 0.6%, which should be sustainable.

True, though it will be spread quite unevenly – this Economist article shows the skew. Local council services will probably be noticeably worse by more than -1%. I’d go along with you that it could have been worse, but that may be the distortion of my own particular circumstances in not losing the benefits I wasn’t getting!